Words! Words! Words!: Autumn 2012 'What do you read, my lord?' thread

plus, he was in the who! how cool is that? i prefer oral history/interview type things over autobios by musicans for the most part (dylan's book being a big big exception cuz it was so amazing) but i would read pete on pete. i never read the keef book either. would buy used someday though. i just can't believe that he remembers anything. or remembers anything accurately anyway. keef not pete.

Finished The History of Love yesterday - it's...alright. Some lovely passages in there but Alma Singer and her brother are a bit too zany-indie-movie for me, but the Leo Gursky chapters are great. The main thing I took away from it though was the need to stop writing endless list sections in my own prose because the ones in this book really weighed it down in parts (a bittersweet feeling as I loved writing listy bits before but have now been shown their capacity to irritate and detract from the story. Ah well).

Onto Jesamyn Ward's Salvage the Bones now.

Maria Dermout's The Ten Thousand Things is a nice quiet thing - Dutch reverie on life on an Indonesian island, kinda magic-realism, esp. in the coda, which pulls all the parts together.

Now onto Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

In Hazard is spectacular as well.

Good to know! I found this a few months ago but haven't had the chance to start it yet.

Currently almost finished with What Maisie Knew by Henry James (pretty great) and Charleston and Other Stories by Jose Donoso (worth checking out but I prefer his longer works).

for some reason i was thinking about one of the final scenes from "this side of paradise" the other day and and i saw mr. ferrenby and his friend in the car as big lebowski and phillip seymoun hoffman. now i can't un-think this!

Coetzee - waiting for the barbarians

Reading a bit of 'Ulysses' for class

Ulysses has lots of that

Coetzee - waiting for the barbarians

that's quite rough, even for coetzee

yeah, but it's good and tight though somewhat schematic and doesn't bring something new to the table

Late Coetzee >> Early Coetzee imo

gonna read Summertime soon, we'll see

I finished The Yiddish Policemen's Union, really enjoyed it. Sure, it kind of dissipated in the very end, but the setting, prose, and classic noir beats were pretty dope.

Might stay on the Jewish tip and read The Instructions on a friend's recommendation (he was the first one to actually read the copy that's been getting passed around here).

I'm closing in on the finish of YPU right now, funnily enough. I initially eyerolled my way through the hamfisted tropes - That's right, tough guy, your ex-wife is now your boss! - but eventually I realized that's really all a part of the fun. It is very entertaining.

The Instructions is good

I'm inserting another book between the first and second Jefferson administrations, Assembling California, John MacPhee.

It's a re-read, but the subject matter is timely for me, because my wife and I are fairly deep into figuring out how to prepare for a 9.0 or greater earthquake that is certain to hit the PNW eventually. The perodicity for these big quakes averages about 300 years and the last one was 312 years ago, in 1700 AD; this has been verified through Japanese records of tsunamis, coupled with local evidence on the Oregon and Washington coasts. We figure it makes sense to have a plan for this, even if there's a perfectly good chance it won't happen for another 100 years.

Anyway, the book is great, although MacPhee has a fondness for the more abstruse geologoical jargon, and the book could use a few more diagrams. It is something of a grand summation of where plate tectonics theory and evidence stood, circa 1990. If you can stand some techno-jargon, it is a good book indeed for understanding this stuff.

aimless: are you planning to go on to adams's madison books after TJ?

I own a copy of the Madison admin histories; eventually I expect to read them, too.

man I really enjoyed Galactic Pot Healer.

The complete short stories of JG Ballard volume 2

Dirty Snow - Simenon. His best novel for sure.

Shining at the Bottom of the Sea - Stephen Marche

Wholly impressive, often entertaining.

On the Simenon tip has anyone read Pedigree? Been curious about it

Thoroughly enjoyed Salvage the Bones. Ward's description of place and landscape is pretty pretty stunning.

Am meant to read the Colson Whitehead zombie novel for next week but fuck that. Started The Third Policeman this morning.

The Third Policeman is awesome.

The cure for every ailment is a dose of Wodehouse, I've learned.

^^^^so fuckin OTM

srsly – I had to stop myself from reading Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit in one sitting.

got through most of on the eve yesterday on the plane - it's riveting, and contains some of the same flourishes that enderared me to turgenev with first love. bersenyev's quiet despair recalls petrovich's, too; articulating the torture of being "friend-zoned" seems to be one of turgenev's stronger talents. (i've still got 40 pages or so, so no spoilers - elena has just told her parents about the marriage.)

i do think i am sort of souring on constance garnett, the translator, though. it's hard to tell of course, being a non-native reader, but the prose can seem a little awkward at times, almost like it's clear i'm reading a translation. maybe it's just my mind playing tricks on me, because i KNOW it's a translation. idk

k3v, thanks for reminding me that I need to reread "First Love" today.

you most certainly must

Turgenev is the least read of the Major Russians, right? On the Eve is such a perfect, lapidary thing .

he's more of a minor with Bulgakov, Goncharov, right? I wouldn't call him a major

probably read more than Gogol, though, right?

I've seen more writers cite "The Overcoat" in the last few years than, say, F&S.

you know what's fun? Googling any kind of syllabus

sounds like a good class: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/slavic/syllabi/G6204.pdf

turgenev was certainly a major at the time and deserves to remain one; i think what's up is the contemporary idea of Big Fat Important Russian Novels is baffled at the sight of fathers and sons

and yeah kev constance garnett is p tortured a lot of the time. i can't knowledgeably recc a turgenev translation tho.

i revived the dostoevsky thread that only i post in the other day but i just finished rereading demons which is prob my favorite dusty; it is hilarious and upsetting and its narration has all these weird structural inconsistencies a polite word for which is "polyphonic", which i've discovered i really enjoy (i also like when ishmael disappears halfway through moby-dick)

totally!

i mean ishmael disappearing

James unfortunately did a lot to create the false Tolstoy/Dostoevksy vs Turgenev binary, although it's true Turgenev (mostly) had no interest in sprawl.

i've never read turgenev, but i kind of blame pevear and volokhonsky for not translating him.

let's start an email campaign

On The Eve as an Oprah book

there's a mean parody of turgenev in demons actually, right down to his (apparently) irritating habit of kissing you on the cheek. he arranges a choreographed dance for a party wherein each of the four dancers represents something like "the mainstream russian press" or "western thought" and everyone hates it.

lol I remember that, he also delivered this amazingly ridiculous prose-poem speech, didn't he? Demons is def my second-favorite of the Big Four Dusty novels (after greatest-nove-ever-written C&P)

not sure what it says about me that while reading this passage

'Then leave me! You see, Elena, when I was taken ill, I did not lose
consciousness at first; I knew I was on the edge of the abyss;
even in the fever, in delirium I knew, I felt vaguely that it was
death coming to me, I took leave of life, of you, of everything; I
gave up hope. . . . And this return to life so suddenly; this light
after the darkness, you--you--near me, with me--your voice, your
breath. . . . It's more than I can stand! I feel I love you
passionately, I hear you call yourself mine, I cannot answer for
myself. . . You must go!'

my first thought was buffy

xp yeah it's his Last Work (the narrator is skeptical) and called lol merci, and it's totally incoherent and has all these visions of early roman kings and mermaids whistling chopin, and goes way over the ideal length for a public reading (twenty minutes says the narrator). someone yells "you never saw any ancus marcius! that's all just style!"